When is a relationship over? Is it when you stop caring amidst the spontaneous rollercoaster of passion, then hate, affection, then annoyance? Is it when you break up? Or is it simply when you move on long after the relationship ended?
The wonderings gather within my brain, prompting me to rethink almost everything that led up to this moment. I recall the past few months, weeks, hours, minutes, seconds. Milliseconds. Moments. Memories.
I like his hands. And the way they fit the first time he held mine. I like the way he smiled after the first time we kissed. How easily we fit. How easily I found it to love him even more. How easy it was to want him.
But I have stopped writing. I stopped reading. I stopped running.
The only thing I have written lately are the hovering thoughts in my head of me breaking up with him. All I’ve read is his piercing stares after I state my annoyance with his natural mannerisms, all of which have existed since I met him. The only running I have done is from him, and the awareness of my vulnerability that has been left out in the open.
Everything I used to do for enjoyment has ceased. My state of being has crippled under the pressure to make things “work”. Work, work. Wasn’t this supposed to be fun? To make us happy? I’m all but close to him, because I intentionally create distance. I feel that this won’t last, so why am I tying a barbed wire to his ankles and dragging him behind me in the dirt? Have I ever been more cruel?
Small moments show me how I’ve lost control of myself, and force me to step back to witness how much I am losing in the process. The blinding gray comes back. A yellow haze becomes a circle around the gray that grows and grows and threatens to destroy everything – myself, and everyone within my emotional vicinity. But none of this makes sense, as much as I try to comprehend.
I take it out on him. And I don’t mean to. He is worthy of the happiest memories and journeys. He deserves all the world’s pleasures and joys, and I’m sorry to have become one of the greatest disappointments in his life. He tries so hard, but I bare no efforts due to my overbearing exhaustion and over-analytical presumptions within every relationship I’ve ever attempted to maintain.
Here we lay, beside each other on his pillowy bed. So close yet so far away. We’re lost within our captivated worlds, separated. My heart hangs on the precipice of falling. It’s painfully loud in my head, except all I hear beyond it is the silence of the fan spinning in recurrent circles to keep my temperature from rising. All I feel is the blankets, with their feeble attempts to convince us that the warm comfort is rooted from the love we said we once shared. All I see is a blur of him on the other side of the world. I’m losing focus abruptly, and trying to get nearer isn’t bringing him back into my vision.
I miss him. But I sit here quietly, letting the distance eat me alive – allowing myself suffer in silence, in my own numbness as it deepens into a vast pit of emptiness. I could be braver for him. I could jump. But I am selfish, indecisive and insecure.I sit wishing he hadn’t wasted his time on me. Wishing he hadn’t invested parts of himself into someone so fleeting.
When the summer ends, the nights grow cold and I’ll find myself alone once again.
laurenpainter.wordpress.com 